a love letter to rome (visit romepix.com for portfolio)

Cloud no. 81

Listening to classical music while flying through the air is something I do when traveling overseas. Here are a couple things I wrote, and the pieces of music I listened to while composing them. detail Gentle Spring, c.1865, Frederick Sandys

My advice is to give your heart away — even though it may return to you in a different state. For then your heart has been in some subtle way changed each time you give it to someone or something.

And does it matter so much if someone else wants your heart?
The beauty of your openness is a sweetness which extends throughout an entire human life when there is so much bitter to the taste of the world. Loving is a kind of reverence to the best few moments we each have on earth. Loving, even without being loved in return, is the choice to chase beauty no matter where you are, as we did when we were youths on the cusp of experiencing all things new, strange, and wonderful. For us we taste the freshness of life anew each time we love for the sake of it, for the sake of others. And we are renewed for these acts where it counts the most, in our interior worlds which rule us more than we’d like to admit.
Love with the hope of growing from it but not being saved by it or saved by anyone is found in the recollection of oneself, in the time it takes to know this new self again in a selfless act …that is all about the self … beyond merely ourselves alone.Lubomyr Melnyk “Illirion” piano “cloud No. 81”

Detail of John William Godward’s Contemplation (1903)

Discover something new which moves you everyday, be like Goethe, find a little verse or literature, a little classical or opera or traditional folk music of some sort, see a little art, read a philosophy or theological quote, and put yourself out in nature near something green or foresty or near water… get under open sky, winter or summer, spring or autumn… in a city park or in pure nature. Move and stretch. Breathe. Drink water. Drink life. Taste the chance of a new encounter, a new idea, a new friend, a new emotion even, some subtle change which alters the fabric of being even as it hints to the past like fleeting clues in a dream half remembered upon waking up and going out into the day.

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4 thoughts on “Cloud no. 81”

I lived in Rome for almost two years and couldn’t ignore the filth, the sloth, the lack of respect for the treasures that are everywhere. It was like seeing someone put out a cigarette on a priceless tapestry. I saw the beauty, then I cringed.

Cloud 81 – I think that it takes some moments of pain or regret or emptiness to bring forth the thoughts that you express here. Just as your Rome is only the beautiful and majestic, here too, you have spared me the parts of your story that might make me cringe and left me with something just as beautiful and majestic.

I am returning here to thank you for the beautiful images you have been sharing daily (until recently) on twitter. From there, I also know that your health has not been the best and that you are at work on a book project of some kind. I wish you good health and the energy to move forward with your passions.